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The Land of the Dead

I walked into Busiris Technical University in the fall of 1971, direct from graduate school, all green and golden and filled with the idealism of the sixties. I came a curious mixture of innocence and experience, having lived through eight years of revolution in higher education, aware of its failures (in graduate school I had spun a composition class around Paul Goodman’s books Growing Up Absurd and Compulsory Miseducation), and confident that its broken promises could be redeemed. Confident, in fact, that redemption was at hand. I arrived enthusiastic about a system of post-secondary education that appeared ready to render life in these United States more decent, more humane, more enlightened, more open to worthy persons of previously disenfranchised classes, and generally more relevant to the real world than what I had known growing up in the fifties and early sixties.

In a word, I believed.

We all believed in those days: Jack, I, Lou Feracca, Marcus DeLotta, Ben Allan Browne, even, in their own weird way, Ted Jones, Virgil Cutter and Victoria Nation. In many respects this story is the history of lost faith, for only in the context of our great expectations for liberal arts education can the rage of a Charles Creed or my own ironic cynicism be understood. Jack’s story is the story of our entire generation, which refused to move mentally from the liberating sixties into the boring ‘70s, or the ideological ‘80s, preferring alienation to accommodation.

As Camille Paglia has observed, “Sixties radicals rarely went on to graduate school; if they did, they often dropped out. If they made it through, they had trouble getting a job and keeping it.” Those who managed promotion and tenure did so only by learning to keep the lip buttoned. Some of those who managed promotion and tenure later opted out of an increasingly lost cause encrusted with meaningless “professional activities,” codes of cultural correctness, and midget-minded colleagues. “This is fucking hopeless,” observes Crash Davis in the movie Bull Durham. “Fuck this fucking game. I fucking quit.”

“Let the silence of our leaving be our only reply,” Charles suggested in 1985, paraphrasing Phil Ochs, one of his favorite lost causes.

Still, an attempt was made. There was a moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What became of that moment is the subject of this book.

Busiris Technical University was admittedly not the optimal environment for educational reconstruction, but, being less than ideal, it offered a legitimate test case. Berkeley, Harvard, Northwestern—they’re easy. Brilliant faculty, brilliant students. Huge endowments, long and illustrious traditions. How can you go wrong? So what can you do with Illinois Normal Tech? With Ma Frickert’s Finishing School for Young Ladies? There’s the real test case. For all its faults, B. T. U. is just your average private American college. There are better, and there are worse. All valid experiments require a representative sample.

Even in the summer of 1971, driving a rented U-haul across the long miles of I-80—Oakland to Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Omaha, Davenport—I understood that Busiris would be a far cry from the vision of my ideal first job which had sustained me through the four-year grind of a Stanford Ph. D. My ideal was a large, multi-cultured, generously funded state institution kinetic with the clamorous passion of colliding ideas. Ivy League, S. E. C., Big Ten, P. A. C. Ten. Busiris just wasn’t that kind of school. It was closer to my alternative vision: a less affluent but pastoral liberal arts college, green with ivy-covered cloisters and brown with tweedy sweaters. In my mind’s eye I recalled picturesque Old Main, Victorian elegant with its high arched windows, red bricks, neo-Gothic chapel (later used as a lecture hall, by my day the admissions office), and soaring clock tower. At the opposite side of the Busiris Quad sat old Busiris Hall, its gray stone facade battlemented along the roof line, three arched cathedral-like doors below a mock rose window, magnificent oak trees shading two wings—recent additions—on the north and south sides. Busiris Hall and Old Main were buildings worthy of Northwestern, Washington University in St. Louis, Knox or Illinois Wesleyan.

But Busiris wasn’t that kind of a place either. Busiris’ grandeur was a botched and mottled beauty. Dwarfing Busiris Hall and the oaks rose the incongruous green and yellow monstrosity of Radio Busiris, an erector set tower bristling with aerials, antennae, cables and dishes. Clearly visible on the far side of campus lay the half-cleared steel rubble of the old field house (soon to become a parking lot), nothing more than a large Quonset hut airplane hangar bought cheap after World War II. In it had played the fabled basketball teams of Busiris’ dynasty years, the teams that raised popular support and funding for the new field house, nearly completed in 1971 on what had been the main campus parking facility. The new field house was a basic block of gray bricks and windows, bigger but not necessarily better, with none of the Quonset hut’s character . . . or home court advantage.

The campus was bounded on one side by Washington Avenue, with its tacky frat rat bars and cafes, and the tackier Brady’s Buck Bonanza, a college clothing and supplies shop that specialized in Busiris monogrammed merchandise and fronted, for an undetermined length of time around 1976, for a call girl operation employing Busiris coeds and run by the B. T. U. chief of security. The other three sides were an angular C of three- and four-story dormitories, cheap tan brick with sliding windows set in black metal frames, classic fifties style, monuments to that golden moment when President Martin Stoddard converted World War II veterans’ benefits into Busiris’ first and only real period of sustained growth. By 1971 the buildings looked archaic and shabby.

As did the tan brick Busiris Student Center. And the tan brick Busiris Buckstore.

“Mark-down Tech,” Jack used to call the school. “Everything done on the cheap. What clothing manufacturers call a second: designer material but crooked seams or misaligned buttonholes. Kids who can’t make Purdue, Northwestern, or the University of Illinois, but are rich enough to afford four years’ play at a private college. They come to Busiris. A university that’s a second, filled with faculty and students who are also seconds. The sooner we admit that, the sooner we’ll be in a position to do something about it. Assuming that anyone wants to do something about it.”

Busiris had a good technical component in those days and a still-powerful basketball team. For their daddy’s bucks, kids got engineering and basketball, fraternities and sororities. Parties began on Thursday afternoon, continued through Monday night chapter meeting. On Tuesday everyone had a hangover. Thursday afternoon everyone was off buying new cocktail dresses and kegs of beer. On Wednesday you could teach. Maybe. One semester Lou Feracca finagled a one-course reduction for something or another, then scheduled his three remaining classes to meet Wednesday only. 9:00-12:00, 1:00-4:00, and 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. Wednesday was the only day kids showed up, he claimed, so why not him?

What brought me to Riverton was the fact that Busiris was a job at a time when the market for English teachers was just beginning that long slide into desperation from which it has never recovered. I am no longer ashamed to admit (although for many years I was) that I had no other offer in 1971. 1971 was a bad year for beginning English teachers, and things went downhill from there. I was lucky to land four interviews and one firm job offer. Those without a Stanford Ph. D. had fewer options than I. Busiris promised a paycheck and a couple of years to build my vita, polish my teaching skills, collect the references and glowing student evaluations that would bring a real job at a more prestigious institution.

In an odd way Busiris was a good place in the early seventies. Behind the times as always, Busiris had in 1971 only just arrived at its moment of expansion. While other schools were cutting programs and faculty, Busiris set out to build a College of Liberal Arts as strong as its College of Technology and Engineering. Becoming “the Northwestern of Downstate Illinois” (the phrase echoed and reechoed through the corridors of Busiris Hall and Old Main) meant offering a full smorgasbord of courses in Far Eastern history, Chinese and Russian language, Mexican and African culture . . . as well as the full range of British, American, and comparative literature courses. The English Department, which for eight decades had contented itself with producing semi-literate engineers, seized the moment to hire a trio of linguists, two Miltonists, a Chaucerian, another (published) Shakespearean, professors of classics, mediaeval, dramatic and non-dramatic Renaissance literature, two creative writers, and a handful of comparative literature people. Charles Creed was one of three recent Ph. D.’s in American Literature. I was to be the man in Victorian prose. The credentials of most of these new people shamed the credentials of the senior faculty who had hired them: Cornell, Penn, Northwestern, Stanford, the Iowa Famous Writers School of Famous Writers.

If Busiris was not quite first rate in 1971, it had a shot at becoming first rate by summer of 1981 . . . even sooner if administration could be persuaded to hire a few more hotshots from Big Ten or Ivy League schools.

Jack said it best: it was an age of faith, an age of folly.

Thus it was that with a profound hope for the future, and a profound ignorance of those economic realities which would shape American higher education in the seventies, I arrived with my wife in Riverton, Illinois, on the banks of the Illinois River, in what William Gass none too affectionately describes as “the heart of the heart of the country.”

Charles, though younger, had preceded me by a year. I had met him briefly during my interview at the school, and hung on him, on Lou Feracca, and on Jeremy “Ted” Jones most of my hopes for the future of the English Department at Tech.

In a private moment during my interview, the three drew me aside.

Jones made the pitch: “This is admittedly an odd place and a long way from respectability. You’re a smart person. You can see for yourself what it’s like. However, while it lacks enough consciousness to remedy its ignorance, Busiris is conscious enough to sense its deficiencies. And to feel apologetic and a little insecure.”

“It is therefore dangerous to itself and others, including you,” Feracca added.

Jack elaborated: “Mediocrity fears excellence and seeks mainly to surround itself with more mediocrity. Actually, mediocrity favors a mediocrity that is just a little more mediocre than itself, so that it can appear borderline excellent in comparison. Understand that basic principal, and you’ll understand how all bureaucracies turn inevitably to shit, why good people leave, why assholes stay. Why the assholes end up, finally, in control of everything, including your future.”

“Professor Creed is being just a trifle bitter,” Jones told me.

“We lost a very dedicated and excellent teacher this year,” Jack said.

“We lost . . . a good, competent teacher.” Jones gave Creed a long look.

Jack went silent.

“Busiris is just like any other institution in that regard,” Jones insisted. “People come and people go. We try to keep the good ones and wave the bad ones farewell. Sometimes we lose a good one. Progress is always intermittent. One step backward for two steps forward. That’s the art of politics.

“Hell, even I give only even money that Busiris survives to 1980, but we kick the assholes good every chance we get, and we terrorize the timid when an important vote comes up, and progress is being made. You would be progress. We could use you. Some other good people are coming this year, a man from Penn State, a fellow from Cornell, a very attractive young lady from Emporia State in Kansas. Dr. Creed here was hired last year from Kent State. Five years ago I’d go home at night thinking, ‘My God, am I here all alone?’ but today, something is clearly happening . . . even if I don’t always know what it is.”

Feracca nodded in agreement.

Jack shrugged his shoulders. “Besides, if you’re any good, you won’t be around here longer than three years,” he added.

This scene I had kept locked in my heart through the late spring and early summer as I finished my dissertation, cleared the final hurdles of written and oral defenses, gathered in mid-August our modest belongings for the trek across the Great Divide, and weathered in late August the humiliating experience of apartment-hunting in a middle-brow, Middle American city where an assistant professorship at the local college was neither lucrative nor prestigious. The college was no help at all, and Creed, Feracca and Jones were out of town. After three days in The Kickapoo Court Motor Inn, Linda and I settled for a two-bedroom second-floor walk-up eight blocks from campus, just beyond the student district, for $275 a month, over a third of what would be my take-home pay.

“Everyone has to start somewhere,” Linda said.

“It’s only temporary,” I promised.

“I’ll get a job,” she said. “McDonald’s is always hiring.”

If our apartment was disappointing, my office assignment was not. I was pleased to learn that Creed and Tucker would be sharing an office on the top floor, south wing of Busiris Hall, in the very shadow of Radio Busiris. To either side, Virgil Cutter and Lucy Kramer, a pair of old gargoyles. But Lou Feracca and another new hire were just down the hall, and Ted Jones would be around the corner.

My desk had been occupied during 1970-71 by Marcus DeLotta . . . whose abrupt departure Jack had alluded to in my interview. Nobody was talking about DeLotta in the fall of 1971. Everyone was talking about the occupant of the other desk in the office.

“Professor Creed is a man of great energy,” Chairman Percy Thompson told me, handing me keys to office and building. “He has already published one article, and a version of his dissertation has been accepted by Studies in American Transcendentalism. There is talk of a book. He will be chairman of this department one day in the not too distant future, and some day a dean or vice president.”

I asked about office supplies.

“See Vi, our secretary, about supplies: stapler, scissors, ruler, tape dispenser.”

I asked about letterhead stationery.

“Envelopes and stationery I keep locked in my office. An envelope is not merely an envelope, Professor Tucker, but a postage stamp as well. In a department our size, costs can get out of control very quickly. How many envelopes did you say you wanted?”

Twelve sheets of Busiris Technical University letterhead and twelve matching Busiris Technical University business envelopes in my hand, I opened the door to office 313.

Jack had finished his stint in summer school shortly before my arrival in Riverton and departed, with Rose Marié and Timm, to spend August with family back East. Precisely one half of the office was stripped bare: empty desk, one empty book case, bare walls, two drawers of the file cabinet pulled open to show they were empty and mine. The other half of the room was a collage of books, posters, photographs, newspaper articles and artifacts which covered the walls and even the ceiling.

Twin posters of John F. Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. dominated one wall. On the front of his desk—greeting all incoming students, colleagues, and administrators—Jack had taped a four-color poster of Dennis Hopper astride his Easy Rider motorcycle, giving the famous flying finger to the Louisiana redneck who would soon blast him to oblivion. Pasted on the wall above his chair was a red, white and blue bumper sticker which read in stars-and-stripes letters “FUCK COMMUNISM.” (“I just want the Busiris peckerwoods to know I’m on their side,” he told me later.) I noticed also a magazine photo of a stunningly beautiful black woman in an Afro, gold hoop earrings, a string of animal teeth brushing the tops of her full and bare breasts—to which Jack had added the caption, “Black Is Beautiful.”

On the side of the file cabinet Jack had pasted the infamous pages of “American Dead in Vietnam: One Week’s Toll,” rows of grainy black-and-white photos clipped from the June 27, 1969 issue of Life magazine.

Not until later did I notice the day-glo poster taped to the ceiling, the small framed picture of one-year-old Timm placed carefully beside his telephone, and the 1970-71 Busiris Bucks basketball schedule, with the scores of each game dutifully recorded in pencil or pen.

Jack had left in medias res, a stack of blue books and the carbon of his summer school grade reports on the desk beside the telephone. On my bare desk Jack had left an unwrapped bottle of New York State Gold Seal champagne with a short note:

The champagne was the highlight of my first week at Busiris.

The week before classes was filled with easy duties and innocent distractions: after three boisterous days of fraternity and sorority rush, the non-Greeks returned to beloved B.T.U. to settle again into dorms and apartments, renew old enmities, log face time in the campus quadrangle, and register for fall classes. Old Main was a great turbulence of comings and goings. Busiris Hall hummed with student-advisor conferences, filling out of schedules, brokering of courses, obtaining of special permissions and override slips. Administration kept a close watch on registration, closing classes that looked as if they would “not make,” and reassigning dispossessed faculty to lower level classes previously taught by “staff.” The more experienced students kept kind of counter-watch, quickly dropping courses reassigned to unpopular faculty, so that those sections also disappeared, necessitating yet another round of reassignments.

In this game administration hopped somewhat behind, as the black market in popular courses meant that the real demand for an upper division course could not be measured until after drop-adds were complete, which was one hour after the last student had registered. Clever upperclassmen, whose rank entitled them to early registration times, often enrolled not in the classes they wanted, but in five freshman or sophomore-level courses taught by the university’s most popular teachers. They then sold their seats to the highest bidder, and drop-added into the advanced courses necessary to complete their degree requirements . . . if those courses hadn’t been cut due to low enrollment. In such cases, a group of angry seniors would visit department chairs and deans, sometimes threatening law suits. Arrangements would have to be made, usually in the form of overloads sections of eight or ten students taught by the dispossessed professor . . . and thus administration found itself stuck with precisely the problem it had sought to eliminate in the first place.

A new and unknown professor with no returning students to drop by my office, no advisees, no rank—a small, unknown cog in a 35-member department—I remained detached from this hubbub, except for a two-hour stint in the gymnasium handing out class tickets. Isolation made me lonesome for the old days at Stanford, where I had been a relatively popular teaching assistant, closer to the ruck and rut of the biannual registration.

Especially the parade of young coeds in search of Professor Creed depressed me.

“Is Chas back yet?” one moon-faced blonde in a striped mini-dress wanted to know. (She was not the first to ask.)

“Not yet.”

“Gee, I was hoping to catch him before the semester begins. I had him last year for comp. He’s the greatest.”

“I’ve met him only once.”

“His office is the greatest too. Sometimes I like to just come here when he’s not around and read the stuff on his walls. It makes me feel all squishy inside, you know? Except the dead soldiers. They give me the creeps.”

“All part of life. Or death.”

“You don’t know when he’ll be here?”

“It’s not my turn to watch him.”

“He’s really sexy. I kind of want him. My roommate wants him, too. That’s okay with me, but I want him first.”

“Maybe you could make a little contest of it.”

“Gee, I never thought of that. What would the prize be?”

“Dr. Creed, I suppose.”

I fled to the library, rereading Emily Bronte against my Victorian novel course.

One day in particular stands out as a low-point in that first week. I spent the morning in the usual tedious workshops for new faculty, signing onto the insurance program, purchasing a sticker that would allow me to park in the as yet uncompleted parking lot, being photographed for a library ID. The ID involved also an unexplained fingerprinting, for which I gave no permission, to which I made no verbal objection. A workshop on “Busiris Rules and Procedures” stressed parking regulations, the registration process, and the need to protect grade rosters at all costs. The coordinator spent one minute with the subheading “Student-Teacher Relationships.” “Keep them cordial,” he suggested. “Busiris is a private institution that relies on student contentment and good will. And try to keep student-teacher relationships with the opposite sex.”

Even Victoria Nation laughed.

We were new to town. What did we know?

During afternoon “free time” I made the acquaintance of Basil Gilmore Wentworth, head librarian at McKinley Library for twenty-two years and the only man on campus to actually wear a camel's hair sweater. After five minutes in polite preliminaries, I found the courage to mention a few weaknesses I had noticed in the Victorian literature holdings.

Wentworth folded his glasses, put them in his pocket and frowned. “You are perfectly correct, Professor Tucker,” he assured me, “perfectly correct. I am sure McKinley Library is not what you were accustomed to at Stanford. I personally dream of a library like that at Stanford, or at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Have you ever seen the collection at Wisconsin? My colleague, Dr. Felix Pollak, is the curator of the small press collection at Wisconsin.” His eyes clouded over. “You must meet Professor Pollak someday. A perfectly remarkable man. Escaped Austria on the eve of the Anschlusz, the breath of Nazi predators on his neck. Fled to the States without a penny. Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from the University of Vienna, perfectly useless. Unwanted here, practically a law against him… .” His voice drifted off.

“Perhaps one day Busiris will become the Wisconsin of Downstate Illinois,” I suggested.

Wentworth started at me uncomprehendingly. Then a light shone in his eyes and discretely he adjusted his hearing aid.

“Pardon me, Professor Tanner. These earphones—they buzz in your ear, and you turn them down, then you see lips moving and hear no voice. Perfectly dreadful thing, age. Dreadful.”

I repeated my hope for Busiris.

“Yes, yes,” he agreed. “I’m afraid, however, that our institution thinks more highly of its basketball team than of its library. In that regard at least, we’ve got the Badgers beat, wouldn’t you say? I believe our Bucks defeated Illinois last year as well.”

I smiled ingratiatingly.

“Well yes. More athletes here than books I’d say. Still, Mr. Tanner, you have to admit, so many books are being published these days, Busiris could not possibly keep abreast, even if we wished to. Catching up is . . . perfectly out of the question. Book prices have risen considerably. We have, as you can see, a dearth of shelf space. We manage as best we can, but until we expand our facilities. . . . This point needs to be made vociferously by you young rabbits as well as by senior faculty, who have been working on this problem for many years now.”

“I do have a checklist of materials,” I began, “both primary and secondary. . . .”

“Acquisition requisitions proceed through the department chairman. You’re in English. Now that chair would be Professor Thompson. The English department’s library acquisitions budget is $500 per annum. The actual acquisitions budget is prepared by the Vice President of Academic Affairs. A case of extreme need can be made directly with him. I’m afraid he’s a very busy man at the moment. . . .”

His voice flickered, then rekindled. “For advanced English courses,” he continued, “many faculty find it most expeditious to stock reserve shelves with their own texts. We do not permit the books to leave the library. I can assure you, Professor Tucker, these books return to their owner at the semester’s end undamaged, and usually unused.”

“My personal library is barely adequate in primary texts, and quite light on criticism,” I apologized. “I subscribe to no journals.”

“Oh, criticism,” Wentworth said dreamily. “Criticism is a truly bottomless pit. And journals—Professor Tanner, a new scholarly journal is started in America every three days. We could not possibly remain current at this library. My colleague Felix Pollak assures me that even Wisconsin can barely remain current.

“Frankly, I’m not sure that all this new criticism is of much significance. You young bucks these days are under so much pressure to publish or perish, you know, that you scarcely have time to teach. And Busiris is, after all, a teaching institution, Professor Tucker. The texts themselves will provide an experience rich enough for most of our students.”

My conversation with Basil Wentworth was followed by the first engagement of what would become an on-going battle with Busiris Buckstore manager Pamela Reese. Less than a week before the start of classes, two of my five required novels were not yet in stock. Pamela promised reluctantly to check again with her supplier, as if she were doing me some kind of favor. “Things are quite hectic now, Mr. Tucker,” she explained. “Fall fraternity and sorority rush is upon us!”

“Things will be even more hectic if those novels aren’t on the shelves when the students want to use them.”

“Professor Tucker, we do our best,” Pamela assured me. “Inevitably some things slip by. This bookstore is a very large operation.”

A good half of the large operation, I noticed, was devoted to sweatshirts, mugs, greeting cards and fraternity/sorority gear.

I noticed also that the texts for English 420-01, Seminar in Contemporary American Poetry, were The Collected Poems of Robert Frost, Mark Harris’s short Selected Poems of Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, and the 1962 edition of Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry. I thought I had passed through a time warp.

“Work on the books, Pamela,” I said finally.

“We do try,” she answered, adding in a stage whisper, “The younger ones in that English department—they can be so . . . impatient, so abrasive. What has Busiris come to? What does this mean?”

Mid-afternoon brought an orientation meeting for new English faculty—eleven of us, precisely the size of the present department of English and Philosophy at B.T.U. My only recollection of that gathering in one of the gray basement classrooms of Busiris Hall was feeling slightly jealous of Ben Allan Browne’s apparent intimacy with Victoria Nation. That jealousy evaporated instantly when Victoria asked her first question: “How many comma splices does it take to flunk a freshman theme?”

The day culminated in the Ninety-third Annual Fall Convocation of University Faculty in the Busiris Hall lecture center: uncomfortable wooden seats, their backs and arms a mass of indecipherable graffiti carved by generations of bored students. Bad music badly played on an electronic organ. The tiresome ritual of introducing green-eyed recruits to gray-eyed veterans, each new member of the Busiris faculty standing as his name and credentials were read: “Miss Victoria Nation, M.A. in English Literature from Emporia State University [polite applause]. Dr. Andrew Tucker [a slight verbal spin on the Dr.] Ph. D. in English Literature from Stanford University [more polite applause]. . . .” An undistinguished president gave an undistinguished speech encouraging us to dare to aspire to academic excellence, pray for the early—and peaceful—completion of the new field house and parking lot, and support the Busiris Bucks in their pursuit of a N.C.A.A. Division 1 basketball championship.

At the convocation’s close I heard for the first time the alma mater:

We new ones, of course, followed text and tune on paper, mumbling along, barely able to suppress our guffaws. The old ones, including President Stoddard, sang loudly and with a reverence that was both contemptible and touching.

That night I told Linda that our stay in Illinois would probably be brief.

The high point of the fall preseason was the Chairman’s Social, a coming-out party for new-comers, and better attended by the older faculty than most subsequent department meetings, despite the fact that admission was by paid ticket only.

“You mean we pay to attend the chairman’s social?” Linda demanded indignantly.

“It’s only ten dollars a ticket.”

Her eyes flashed. “There are thirty-five members of that department. And probably thirty-five spouses or guests.” Seventy tickets, at ten dollars apiece, is close to your monthly salary. Which, I would like to point out, you have not seen and will not see until the end, not the beginning, of the month.”

“I see no way out of it.”

“The Creeds will not be there. The Creeds are not even in town.”

“We’re in town and everyone knows it. Charles is second year and published. I’m new and unpublished.”

“Percy Thompson makes three times what you make, and we pay to go to his party. Does this make sense to you?”

“I’ve asked around. Apparently all departments have similar chairman’s socials. Maybe that’s how it’s done in the Midlands. We’ll go and do our politics.”

“ ‘Our stay in Illinois will be brief.’ That’s a quote.”

“ ‘You have to start somewhere.’ That’s another quote.”

I wrote a post-dated check for twenty dollars, added a note saying we’d be honored to attend Chairman Thompson’s reception, and sealed them in one of my twelve Busiris Technical University envelopes. Which I placed directly in Chairman Thompson’s mail box, saving the department the further expense of postage.

The whole ugly scene could have been avoided had I been told earlier rather than later that our “tickets” were in fact contributions to the tax-deductible Bucks Boosters Organization, in return for which our department received two free seasons passes to home Bucks basketball games, to be offered as door prizes at the Chairman’s Social.

(I did not win the door prize.)

The gala affair was hosted by Percy and Edna Thompson at the home to which Rose Marié Creed always aspired: a white clapboard colonial, post-war, on nearly an acre of land in Knollwoods, Riverton’s most tastefully landscaped and carefully manicured neighborhood. Grandfather clock in the entrance hall, nineteenth century British landscape in elaborate gold frame over the living room fireplace, gray wall-to-wall carpet throughout. An enormous recreation room in bookshelves and knotty pine paneling. A genuine red leather sofa and six large matching chairs. On one library table, an expensive facsimile folio edition of Dr. Johnson’s dictionary; on another, four volumes of the 1783 quarto edition of his Lives of the Poets.

The food and alcohol were both demonstrably inferior to what Linda and I had known in California, and here were people not entirely comfortable with each other. The Old Ones congregated on one side of the room, youngsters on the other. The air was full of names which were then unimportant to me, and issues I had not yet identified. Meaningless phrases ghosted around me. “Just love to move into 305, if and when Iverson finally retires.” “Gave him the C, of course, or he’d never have played a day in the N.B.A.” “Trustworthy and sensible—a perfect candidate for curriculum committee.” “The ‘65 edition, not that abomination they released in ‘71.” “It’s his.” “What’s mine?” “Where what is?”

Linda and I clung mostly to each other, squaring off in moments of polite conversation with various unknown faces who, with the self-consciousness of perfect strangers, introduced themselves to the young Stanford Ph. D. they had interviewed and hired only a few months previous.

“And you must be . . . ?” Edna Thompson asked as her husband accepted Linda’s jacket. I took him to be the venerable professor Ivorson himself, but he was not the venerable emeritus. I was introducing myself when Ted Jones broke in.

“This is Andy Tucker, part of the new Busiris,” Ted Jones informed her promotionally, his left hand on my shoulder, a daiquiri in his right hand. “And his lovely wife Betty.” The daiquiri shifted to his left hand, and his right hand to Linda’s waist.

“Linda.”

“Linda. His lovely wife Linda. His lovely and young wife Linda. Lovely Linda and her husband Andrew. Part of the new Busiris. From Stanford, a lovely school. My degree is from Southern Illinois University, and I have yet to publish an article in a major scholarly journal, but I’m already an associate professor because I got to Busiris eight years ahead of you. Not so young, but wiser. Nearly a wily veteran. Over there is my not-so-young but wily-veteran wife, Carolyn. Come, Andrew, let me introduce you to my wife Carolyn.”

Five minutes later Ted Jones and his daiquiri had dropped Lovely Linda and me to politic elsewhere. We were set upon immediately by a part of Old Busiris, which had been eying with obvious disapproval our conversation with Jones. Virgil Cutter, Ph. D., Brown University ‘55, had achieved the rank of full professor on the strength of a nine-page article in the less-than-first-rank The Bradley Literary Quarterly (his distilled dissertation, published by Busiris’s chief downstate rival in mediocrity, finally, in 1966) and two three-paragraph entries in Notes and Queries. Cutter clearly considered himself the dean of Busiris scholars, whose blessing was important to anyone aspiring to a career at the institution.

Cutter was harrumphing his way through a chicken drumstick when he turned his attention to business of dispensing sage advice to a young admirer seeking to make his way in the profession and the University. He handed Linda the drumstick to free a hand for potato salad, and informed me that my future at the school would depend in large part on my record of professional accomplishments, including publication. He noted with some satisfaction that Professor Jones, the man with whom I had just been speaking, was as yet unpublished, and that one of the younger men, a Dr. John Credo, who was out of town at the moment, had already published an article in Studies in American Transcendentalism. His forced enthusiasm for Jack’s article suggested that in Cutter’s opinion Charles was an irreverent upstart, a clear threat to his ascendancy, and should I follow his lead, I too would be considered a threat, to be dealt with accordingly.

“You must not be in a rush about getting just anything into print,” Cutter pontificated. “True scholarship takes deliberation and mature judgment. Your work must be solid. The spoken word promotes or accuses us for a moment only, but words fixed on paper condemn or exonerate us across all the vast expanses of all eternity.”

I nodded solemnly.

“Another small piece of advice, young man,” he added, reclaiming his chicken bone. “Be selective in your company. Professor Jones over there . . . a politician, not a scholar. You meet your classes regularly, honor your betters, support the Bucks, and you’ll have a long and rewarding career at this institution. As have I. That’s the best way to make your pretty little wife happy.” Cutter winked at Linda and motioned to a short, birdy woman in a gray dress and a gin-and-tonic. She walked up to him immediately when she heard him speak.

“Here’s one of those betters right now, young man. Professor Kramer, may I present you with… .”

“Tucker. Andrew Tucker. This is my wife, Linda.”

“Dr. Tucker is from Stanford, Lucy. An established school which, I am sure, produces a solid, quality product. Eh, Tucker?”

“Very solid. Very credentialed. Not yet published.”

“That will come in time,” Cutter assured me. “Now Professor Kramer has enjoyed a very rewarding career at Busiris, right Lucy?”

Lucy Kramer had taught at Busiris since receiving her Masters from Illinois Normal School in 1941: thirty years of freshman composition and introduction to literary studies. Those thirty years, however, had made her, like Cutter, a powerful player among the Busiris old guard.

“You three have a good little chat,” Cutter ordered. “I have something to discuss with Professor Thompson.”

“I have not published an article in my life,” Kramer announced as soon as Cutter had turned his back. “Virgil Cutter is an old fool. What’s more, he knows it. His research will never amount to a hill of beans. Busiris is primarily a teaching institution, Professor Tucker.” She poked at me with a pencil in her right hand. “We teach students here, we don’t write books. Invest your energy in teaching and committee work, not in irrelevant articles that are not read and don’t bring promotions or raises.”

Linda and I nodded.

“Another thing,” Lucy warned, poking at me again. “There are some younger members of this department, perhaps you’ve been approached by them already, who are engaged in certain radical activities . . . I’m not at liberty to divulge them. I assure you, they are serious. Many of us have given our careers to this institution and will not stand by while it is undermined by outsiders who trivialize the discipline and depreciate the coinage of American education. Perhaps some of these people have approached you already?”

I nodded negatively.

“They will. I’m sure there was none of that at Stanford, but that Berkeley… . This school would never hire anyone with a degree from Berkeley. Or Columbia. Busiris experienced great turmoil last year, Mr. Tucker, thanks mainly to that Marcus DeLotta and some of his henchmen. You have heard about him? Mr. DeLotta is now no longer with Busiris.”

Linda and I exchanged innocent glances.

“There are others both inside and outside of the department. Old Main is aware of the situation. Measures will be taken. This institution pays you to teach your classes, Mr. Tucker. Not to write silly articles or preach radical ideas to innocent Midwestern minds.”

“Stanford is about as unradical a place as you can imagine.”

“Don’t let that young Dr. Creed lead you astray, Professor Tucker. Or Ted Jones either.” Kramer gave me another poke of her pencil.

“He’s a big boy now, Professor Kramer,” Linda assured her. “He’s got a Ph. D.”

“These are treacherous times, young lady,” Kramer warned my wife. “A woman has got to give her husband all the support she can.”

I smiled pleasantly and steered Linda toward the wine.

“What a strange group of people,” Linda meditated aloud, “trying to sound your opinions and solicit your support for some departmental Armageddon that they don’t want to talk about. Your pretty little wife better get you out of here while you’re still alive.”

“We drink. We listen. We smile. At ten o’clock we depart.”

“Meanwhile, we study the books on our host’s shelves,” suggested Linda, turning her face to the wall.

“Percy has always had such reverence for the Word,” said a voice behind us. It was Edna Thompson trying to make conversation with a whiskey sour. “And for those who use it well. He believes that a few words well chosen have more force than whole armies of soldiers.”

“The written word is the only power I know that survives the moment of its generation,” the Chairman explained, joining us. He too was a whiskey sour man. “The word continues its act of wounding or healing long after the author who wrote it is dead. But as a scholar, Andrew, you appreciate that fact.”

“Percy’s specialty is the Eighteenth Century, but he is an avid reader of novels,” Edna assured me. “Especially modern American. Of course he’s no match for Ted Jones there, who’s been through most of Hemingway and all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books.”

“Ironic,” Thompson added, “since I’m the one from Fitzgerald’s home town. Ted is . . . well now, where is Ted from, Edna?”

“A North Country man?” Linda asked.

“I left Minnesota years ago when I went to graduate school. Never returned. Though I still have many contacts among the farmers and the lumberjacks.”

“Professor Jones owns a first edition of The Great Gatsby,” Edna told Linda, “but Percy owns the 1873 quarto of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.”

“Is Professor Jones teaching the seminar in contemporary American poetry?” I asked.

“That would be Professor Iverson,” Thompson told me. “I don’t believe you’ve met him yet. Unfortunately he could not be here tonight.”

“Professor Iverson is emeritus,” Edna explained. “He retired three years ago, but Busiris simply can’t do without him. A brilliant man, really, and quite charming. One evening we shall have you and him out for dinner.”

“Our personal library occupies four rooms of the house,” Thompson announced. “This downstairs study contained Pre-Romantic British Literature only. All other books are housed in three upstairs bedrooms. Formerly I used a Dewey Decimal system, but six years ago I converted to the Library of Congress system.

“How do you organize the books of your library?” Thompson wanted to know.

“Mostly on shelves at the moment,” I said without thinking.

“We’re still unpacking,” Linda explained.

“Professor Iverson actually organizes his by the color of their binding. Claims he knows every book he owns by the shade of its spine. Amazing fellow, simply amazing. You must meet him sometime. I understand Professor Creed arranges his books by the slant of their politics. Or used to. Had to give it up, because they all leaned too far left and fell over.”

“Percy,” Edna admonished.

“It must be the wine, darling.” Thompson chuckled engagingly. “You’ll know us all soon enough, Professor Tucker. We each have our foibles, but we are all family. Isn’t that right, Edna?”

“We like to think so. You two just enjoy yourselves here. And don’t spend all night with your nose in a book. Introduce yourselves to your younger colleagues. You young ones are the future of the institution. It’s up to you to take good care of us old ones.”

“Family,” I promised as Chairman and Mrs. Thompson drifted off.

“Percy and the Family Shark,” whispered Linda.

“Isn’t it amazing,” I asked my wife, “the extent to which Charles Creed, an untenured man younger than ourselves, has in a single year’s time impressed himself on a department of three dozen persons, including veterans of two and three decades? He’s not even here, but his presence is everywhere.”

“What amazes me,” Linda answered, “is how he gets to be perpetually absent, while the rest of us have to put up with bad food, bad wine, and the likes of Ted Jones, Virgil Cutter, and bird lady, whoever she was. In that company, Richard Nixon would be a standout.”

Inevitably we abandoned politicing our betters and fell into the younger group clustered around Ted Jones and Lou Feracca. Edna Thompson was right: these were our people and if not the future of this institution, the future of higher education. Among them we would find our friends.

“The fact of the matter is,” Ben Allan Browne was saying, “it’s a very factionalized department.”

“Every department in the country is polarized these days,” Feracca pointed out.

“From what I’ve heard,” I said, “on crucial issues the liberals tend to join with the moderates and just outvote the old guard.”

“We do,” Jones agreed. “We beat them up pretty bad on almost everything these days.”

“Except salary,” Ben Allan Browne complained. “A high school drop-out starting at the brewery or the John Deere plant has an annual income 1.8 times that of a Ph. D. ten years his senior starting at Busiris Technical University.”

“That’s because they are union and you’re not,” said a thirty-something Italian in a Kelly green sweater and a bourbon and water. “But ‘union’ is not a word you want to use around here tonight.”

“Michael Stella, lawyer per excellence,” Jones announced. “If you really did it, Michael is the guy to hire.”

“Michael Stella, the Italian Stallion,” said Stella. “Ted’s friend and Percy’s neighbor to the west. Ted here invites me to these things because he likes to talk crooks. I come because I like to drink cheap booze. And congratulate myself on going to law school when my mama wanted me to get a Ph. D.”

“That’s a joke, son,” Jones told Browne, who was not laughing.

“John Deere has a union,” Ben Allan grumbled, “and that’s why the dumbest fuck on their line earns twice what I do in a year. To start.”

“They do,” Stella told him. “I know because I am paid a handsome retainer by that union. This also I know: the first person who mentions ‘union’ tonight will be out like a leper. Spies are everywhere. Correct that: the next person who mentions union will be off like a prom dress. Because the first left last year.”

“Marcus DeLotta?”

“I say no more. Fellows, don’t use the word ‘union.’ Not at this party.”

“Or school,” Jones added. “You noticed that where most schools have a Student Union, Busiris has a Student Center?”

“Oh, bullshit!” Linda objected.

“Bullshit no, my lovely Linda. I am absolutely serious. These things and others you must learn, Linda Tucker, if your husband is to survive the treacherous waters of Busiris Technical University.”

“True,” said Browne. “Ask Cutter. I quote: ‘Young man, it’s a student center, not a student union. If you expect to stay with us very long, you will learn the difference.’ His exact words.”

“Shit,” Lou Feracca said. “Busiris students have fatter billfolds than Busiris teachers, and they’re not unionized. I got invited to be advisor of the Vets Club last year. Turned them down flat, of course. I thought it meant veterans, a lot of redneck flag-wavers. I told Jack Creed, and he laughed his balls off. Turns out it’s a club of students who all drive Corvettes. Goddam twenty-year-old college kids, they all drive Corvettes.”

“Tell me about this Charles Creed,” Linda was asking Carolyn Jones when the doorbell rang.

“Perhaps you will join me at the desert table,” Carolyn suggested, smiling at her husband and motioning Linda away from the men.

At that point, however, all conversation ceased. The doorbell had been rung by Victoria Nation, making her fashionably late and carefully staged arrival. “Is this where I hand in my ticket?” she inquired loudly. Then, assured all eyes were on her, she presented her hostess with a bottle of wine and her host with her brown suede jacket, which she removed to reveal bare breasts beneath the lightest of light-blue see-through blouses. Percy Thompson’s jaw dropped two feet. Edna Thompson averted her eyes. Lucy Kramer gasped audibly. Even my Linda, West Coast sophisticated, did a double-take.

It was a full thirty seconds before anyone recovered.

Jones broke the silence. “Now there’s something you would not have seen at a Busiris faculty party ten years ago.”

“Yeah: a see-through blouse you don’t want to,” said Ben Allan Browne.

“No—an English professor of who’s a piece of ass.”

“She’s no horny English prof,” Browne said. “Her dad’s a Methodist minister from Kansas. There are also, I understand, bloodlines to Carry Nation. The Carry Nation, as in ax-wielder.”

“Looks like a preacher’s kid in rebellion to me.”

“It’s not much of a rebellion,” Browne insisted. “What you see now is definitely not what you gonna get later. I had dinner with her Thursday, and I can tell you she’s one uptight bitch. Comes on strong, suckers you into making a move, then hits you with moral indignation. Thursday night she was braless under a white cotton blouse. Top two, count ‘em two, buttons gone. When I met her at the restaurant, I thought, ‘hot damn.’ We talked comma splices, Christ symbols, and Charles Creed all evening. The nasal whine is a real turnoff, too.”

“Charles banging her?” Jones wanted to know.

“Not in her wettest dream.”

“She got the hots for Charles?”

“Victoria has not even met Charles,” Browne continued. “She knows him strictly by reputation. He’s the biggest, strongest bull around, so of course Victoria wants into the ring with him. Swirl her tight ass as close to Charles as she can without getting gored. Show what a little pussy cat Big Bull really is. God help us all if he acts like a big, mean bull and tries to stick it to her. We’d never hear the end of it. Victoria’s a goddamn case.

“The great-aunt bashed barstools, the grand-niece cuts balls. Victoria and I drove home in separate cars, to separate apartments, to separate beds.”

Victoria spent half an hour chatting up the senior males, arms crossed tightly over her chest, even while sipping wine or nibbling little wienies in barbecue sauce. Wilting finally under their relentless ogling, she joined the junior faculty . . . where she was relentlessly ogled by the youngsters.

“Honestly, Lou,” she exclaimed, somewhere between exasperation and coquettishness; “You fellows act as if you’d never seen a pair of tits in your lives!”

“If it’s not for sale, Victoria. . . .”

“I’m not for sale, boys. However, that doesn’t mean that I can’t be had. You fellows are just going about things all wrong.”

“Are these tits for sale?” Ted Jones wanted to know.

“Does this little boy have a breast fixation?”

“The day will come,” Browne told her, “when you will be desperate for someone to pay attention to your tits.”

“You boys might be more successful if you could raise the level of your conversation to somewhere above the belt.”

“Maybe you could raise it for us,” Jones suggested. Then, quickly, “That’s a joke, ma’am, that’s a joke.”

“Oh, where is the knight who is worthy of my tits?” crooned Lou Feracca.

“Victoria wants to be loved without being anybody’s lover,” Browne said.

Victoria looked to the wives for support, but read none in their eyes. “You guys should try being female,” she said angrily. “For one week you should try being female in America. Every one of you.”

“And settle for an Emporia State M.A.?”

“Okay, so look, I don’t have a Ph. D. from Cornell,” Nation admitted. “I’ll probably never write a book. At Emporia State I received perfectly adequate preparation for what I’m doing here at Busiris: teaching. I don’t need a research Ph. D. to be a dedicated teacher. What our students need is a little more dedicated, supportive teaching and a little less irrelevant, competitive, male so-called professionalism.”

“The M.A. from Emporia with the nice tits has spoken well,” Ted Jones announced.

Queen Victoria was not complimented. “Stare, stare. Joke, joke. Where have guys been living the last three years? It’s 1971. Grow up, Professor Jones.”

“You started this thing,” Michael Stella pointed out, buffering his friend. “In this case you have what is called contributory negligence”

“You can’t come to a party dressed for the party, then decide you don’t like it, and try to change the rules,” Feracca told Nation.

“All the squares go home!” chanted Browne.

“Why do you guys get to decide what the party is?” Victoria wanted to know. “The party will be what I make it.”

“People who dress to invite attention can’t choose the direction from which it comes,” I pointed out. “Besides, you’re in the power position. You walk in here in that outfit and are surrounded immediately by a ring of admiring males. Then you get to choose. The party becomes what you make it. That’s not a bad deal, I’d say.”

Victoria softened. “You can look, Mr. Tucker, but be suave.” The flicker of a smile crossed her face. Her right thumb dropped to the inside of her left elbow, revealing the lightly veiled nipple.

“Very lovely,” I told her. “Maybe we could all just ignore the message and focus exclusively on the medium.”

“I’ll show you mine, Victoria, if you show me yours,” offered Ben Allan Browne.

“She already has,” said Jones.

“There you go again.”

“I got $10 says those are the loveliest bosoms at this party,” Stella offered. “Anyone matching my $10 can name the competition.”

“Who gets to judge?”

“We all judge. Winning pair of bosoms takes all the cash. Who’s in?”

“Boorish, boorish, boorish.”

“You’re a cow, Victoria,” jeered Ben Allan. “Give us some milk or go home.”

Victoria Nation was left with the wives . . . who were suspicious, and thus hostile.

That evening—more because of her blouse than her bosom—Ben Allan Browne tagged Victoria with the nickname “tits,” which, to the puzzlement of everyone who knew Victoria only in her later years, stuck doggedly to her throughout the seventies and into the eighties.

“That hussy was coming on to you,” Linda hissed as soon as we entered the car.

“She was coming on to everyone. Ben Allan Browne says it’s her style: come on, back off.”

“Stay away from that woman. Her type is dangerous, especially to the men they ask for help. Trust your lovely and young wife Linda on this. Let me give you some support here. I know Nation’s type. She’s true bitch.”

“Victoria is just a little girl lost, afraid and far from Kansas, trying to put on a brave front.”

“ ‘A brave front’ this is called?”

“Hell. An M.A. from Emporia State needs all the political leverage she can manage.”

“So what did Carolyn Jones have to say about Charles Creed?”

“Not a thing. Our discussion was terminally interrupted. The unpublished Miss Nation, M.A. from Kansas, obliterated the published Dr. Creed with one flash of her left nipple. Stay away from that woman.”